Insurance for Law Firms Los Angeles – Should You Consider Cyber Liability Insurance?

Every law firm should have professional liability cover in order to protect themselves against lawsuits. Although ironic, lawyers also have to face lawsuits from their clients and have to defend themselves against allegations. Since such cases can be expensive and long drawn, insurance for law firms in Los Angeles is crucial. When you consider purchasing insurance for your firm, you are faced with different options for coverage. One such option is cyber liability. In the recent times, this cover has become crucially important because of the increased cases of information breaches.

As a lawyer, one of the basic requisites of your profession is to safeguard the confidentiality of information that your client shares with you. If this information leaks, your client’s safety and privacy could be severely compromised and the client could file a lawsuit against you. If the client does, cyber liability insurance protects you. However, the question is, does this coverage apply to your practice? In most of the cases, the coverage is crucially important.

What does the policy cover?

Cyber liability insurance for law firms in Los Angeles covers all third party claims which are a resultant of breach of confidential data from the insured attorney’s network or database. Coverage is extended to both offline and online data. Offline data include paper files, documents and CDs, DVDs or cassettes of video recordings or audio recordings that are vital for the case. Online data loss includes all the information lost due to virus attacks on computers, websites being hacked and email infiltration.

In addition to offering coverage for loss of information, cyber liability insurance also covers fees, fines and penalties that result from the lawsuit.

Another important coverage offered under cyber liability is for breaching copyrights and trademark infringements. It could also include slander, plagiarism, negative advertising and causing personal injury such as reputation damage.

When you lose data as a result of breach, be it online or offline, you need to spend some money to recover the lost information. Cyber liability coverage covers these expenses as well.

Breach of information leads to several unwarranted expenses such as the money involved in notifying clients, advertising for fresh data, monitoring different channels to track the leak, IT forensics, mailing expenses and several others. Public relations officer might need to be hired to cover up the damage to reputation. All these expenses are covered by cyber liability insurance.

One of the worst nightmares of any lawyer is breach of information. But the matter gets worse if and when the culprit begins to blackmail the lawyer in return of information. Extortion might lead to more expenses. If you have cyber liability insurance for your law firm in Los Angeles, you can be assured that such expenses are covered by the policy. The insurance also covers cyber terrorism, if you happen to an unfortunate victim.

Considering these risks, which are potential threats to most of the law firms, you should consider purchasing cyber liability insurance.